The vinaigrette

In a shameless attempt at garnering more points and further procrastinating my paper, I am posting the vinaigrette for the preceeding salad as a seperate recipe.

In my defense, lest you judge to harshly, it applies to much more than this salad, and has so many possible variations that it was a cumbersome addition to the salad post.

You really need to know one major principle in the making of any vinaigrette. Are you ready? Its a ratio. 2:1.

Tough, right?

That's 2 parts oil for one part vinegar. This is your base.

You can use whatever kind of oil you want, although olive oil is both traditional and healthy, peanut oil can make for a nice flavor, and canola oil works if you are a poor starving student forced to improvise on a crappy budget or on the leftovers people have in the cupboards.

And, while the options for the vineagar are infinite, I must warn you to not eliminate the possibility of using just plain white vineagar. It has its benefits, and it depends on the salad.

Next you need to think about the essence of your vinaigrette. Do you need a citrus feel to it? Add some lemon juice. Are there crasins in your salad? Try a little orange juice in your dressing. Is the salad mostly made up of tart or bitter ingredients? Put mustard in the dressing. (Weird logic? not really. Mustard is very good at drawing out sweet flavors, especially if you are just putting that yellow "French's" stuff into it. Which I give you permission to do, as long as you tell NO ONE.) The rule for any of these additions is that however many you use, one or 5, the amount should equal your vinegar.

(Incidentally, if you insist on making the vinaigrette without adding these flavors, you should increase the vinegar to equal the oil, making it a 1:1 ratio.

But thats not all! Simply mixing oil and vineagar will never impress anyone, so start thinking spices. Salt and pepper, yes, but you know that spice rack you got as a wedding present that you never really touched except for the cinnamon which is now empty? Yeah, open that up and start smelling things. If you like the smell, throw it in. It only takes a couple of tries before you find a combination that really expresses your flavor. Or, if you don't have a spice rack at your disposal, start digging through the cupboards and discover the random spices you have accumulated over the years.

Make the dressing a few times and put it on the side, pretty soon you will find the simplicity of mixing it as easy as grabbing a bottle out of the fridge, and you might even start preferring it so much, you stop buying dressings altogether.